If you don’t understand the requirements then you are unlikely to ever derive any benefit from link-building.

Attributes Of Good BackLinks:

1. On Google Indexed Websites

2. Topic & Theme Related (category specific links)

3. On a unique link, class C IP address to your other backlinks

4. Contextual

5. Non orphan pages

6. Variety of link text

7. Natural Google PR spread

8. Natural Brand/URL backlinks

9. Deep Linking

10. Long-tail Back Linking

11. Image Links

12. No Link Networks / Bad Neighbourhoods

13. Natural ‘No Follow’ ratio

There are quite a lot of factors that are needed.

In essence, you need to build backlinks on the best quality, relevant, authority pages that you can find.

By doing that you will build category specific backlinks which in the real world will have the biggest impact on SERP’s.

In an ideal world, you will be referenced from a noted ‘authority’ on your subject, using a ‘contextual’ link to reference your article or content as being a useful resource.

As a high ranking authority resource, the site that links to you will carry a lot of link juice and its recommendation of your content will reaffirm to Google that you are worth ranking highly too.

Checking potential linking pages for quality has become much harder in recent times as it is increasingly difficult to be able to determine if the site is carrying a Google penalty or not. (If it ranks well for the focus of the content then you can have some confidence in the power a back link will give you).

It is also important to note that just because a particular site is considered beneficial for a backlink today, that doesn’t guarantee that it will still be a good backlink source tomorrow.

Google makes ongoing decisions and is constantly removing backlink networks as they are located, so be aware that the value and influence of your backlinks can vary over time.

Where To Find Links?

Backlink Building Strategy

1. Use ahrefs, majesticSEO or SEMRush to analyse the sites that are currently ranking well for the keywords that you want to rank for.

These backlinks are currently providing top rankings for your competitor, so you know that the majority of them are Google friendly and influential.

2. Export a list of their backlink profiles – these links are responsible for their current rankings.

3. Visit each of the link pages in turn and explore their backlinks to see if you can add your own – use the site contact details to ask for a link manually.

It is always possible that some of their backlinks are not providing a positive benefit to their rankings so use your own judgement to evaluate the merits of each link you can obtain.

Generally, the easier the link is to create, the less authority and value it is going to have.

So if your competitor has a handful of blog comments for example, don’t just dive in adding as many as you can because these are relatively low value backlinks and while it isn’t usually harmful to have a few of them in your link profile (it looks natural), too many will actually harm your rankings without a balance of higher value links too.

Exact phrase match anchors

– are the most powerful in your arsenal, but should be used very sparingly.

The suggestion that a fixed percentage will work for you can be misleading because while “up to 1%” is a common recommendation, there are a few issues with this as a strategy.

If your site has 100 backlinks, then 1% = one link and that won’t do you any harm at all, but if your site has 1,000,000 back-links then 1% = 1000 backlinks.

If 1000 backlinks point to your site with identical link text, your profile will look very unnatural and Google will penalise you.

Image links are very natural, and should be an important part of your backlink profile.

Additionally, if you create some image links, and leave the alt text attribute empty, then the image won’t have any anchor and ahrefs.com and majesticseo.com will report ’empty link text’ in their results.

Quick Ranking with Effective Backlinks

If you have a new page, with no backlinks pointing to it, there is a strategy you can employ to give yourself good ranking results with the smallest amount of backlinks possible.

First, build one good quality text link using the exact anchor text (you want to rank for) pointing to that page.

Don’t worry about the page having a 100% exact match backlink profile.

One link on its own doesn’t work like that.

It is your overall profile that triggers over optimization penalties, so one link (which could easily occur totally naturally) just doesn’t carry the influence to get you banned.

Once this backlink has been built, sit and wait to let it propagate and see where your page rankings settle down.

In many instances, this solo backlink will be enough to power many pages into the top 10.

If your rankings still need more of a boost, start drip feeding Brand, Longtail, empty and junk links into the page.

It’s important to continue to use Google friendly pages to link to your content. Continue to monitor your rankings for the page.

If you still need another boost, build a second backlink using the same anchor text into the page and wait and review.

Using this process, you will need far fewer backlinks than you might think to achieve top rankings.

More:

If you are struggling to find and build authoritative backlinks for yourself, you are not alone, it’s a common issue. Finding high quality sites that will publish your link, checking that they are Google friendly and actually asking for the backlink is a time consuming process.

Without all the software you will need to accurately assess each potential link site, it’s virtually impossible to be sure that the backlinks you will be building will have the necessary categorisation, trust and authority that you should be looking for in a link.

Don’t take a chance with your backlinks….. it’s much harder to get a link removed when you discover that it’s harming your rankings than it is to build quality backlinks in the first place.